Translation

In the early years of the 15th century, Renaissance humanists insisted that the capacity to translate texts from Greek and Hebrew into Latin, and later into and between vernacular tongues, was a critical aspect of grammar and rhetoric. When performed by students, schoolmasters claimed that translation and double translation facilitated eloquence in both languages. When performed by adepts, men and women of letters praised translation for transmitting texts to a new or wider readership, or to a more culturally and geographically specific one. Contemporaries regarded translations as literary works in their own right. As such, the translation of scripture became a flashpoint for controversy, particularly when Desiderius Erasmus’s Latin translation and annotations and Martin Luther’s German Bible encouraged religious reform and schism. Traditionally, scholarship on translation in this period has been dominated by studies of the transmission of the Renaissance or of religious reformation. There have been examinations of significant translators, such as Jacques Amyot, and of the way that the works of one major author, like Erasmus, were received in a specific locality. Scholars of the reformations have published significant studies of the scriptural translations of Erasmus, Luther, and Luther’s followers. In the 1970s, the new field of translation studies questioned whether it was ever possible to find real equivalences between languages and across cultures. This approach encouraged scholars to examine what was lost, gained, transformed, or created anew in an act of translation. More recently, a growing awareness of the historical contingency of acts of translation has encouraged interdisciplinary efforts to examine translation as a cultural event. The result of this historical turn has been a flowering of period-specific studies, series, and editions. Scholars of the Middle Ages have questioned the idea that Renaissance humanists’ translations represented a break from medieval efforts. Literary scholars and intellectual historians have examined early modern treatises on the theory of translation, as taught in schools and practiced by adepts. The identity of the translator has attracted the attention of scholars of literature and gender, in particular, since many early modern women’s literary productions were translations. A broader range of texts in translation—beyond classical and literary works and scripture—have been studied by historians of science, political and historical thought, and religion. Historians of the book have examined the relationship between translation and manuscript and print culture. The peripheries of translation culture are also being explored, and the world beyond Europe has become a focus, particularly in studies of missionary, commercial, and colonizing activities in Asia and the Atlantic.

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